Pickups, Minivans Criticized For Safety

Industry Regulators And Engineers Say The Models Pose Risks To Occupants And Others.

December 12, 1997|By New York Times

DEARBORN, MICH. — Sport utility vehicles, minivans and pickups - so-called light trucks - pose serious safety problems to their occupants and increase the risk for other drivers on the road, said auto industry regulators and engineers at a conference that ended Thursday.

Sport utility vehicles, which many Americans buy partly because they seem safer than cars, roll over so often that their occupants are just as likely to die in an accident as car occupants, a prominent researcher said. Most of these rollovers are caused by collisions with other vehicles, curbs and other objects, and not by swerving, two federal officials said.

Brakes on light trucks, which now account for one of every two family vehicles sold, generally are not as effective as car brakes, partly because federal safety standards for trucks are slightly more lenient than those for cars, a leading brake engineer said.

Large sport utility vehicles and pickups account for an unusually large share of pedestrian deaths, apparently because of their weaker brakes and lack of maneuverability, a senior regulator said.

Meanwhile, sport utility vehicles are nearly three times as likely as cars to kill the drivers of other vehicles during collisions, said Thomas Hollowell, a top researcher at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Among the more popular sport utility vehicles are the Jeep Cherokee and Wrangler, the Ford Explorer and Expedition, the Chevrolet Blazer and Suburban and the Nissan Pathfinder.

Regulators and insurers are becoming much more interested in the dangers posed by light trucks, to the dismay of auto executives, who worry that their most profitable models could soon be subject to tighter regulations or higher insurance rates.

The Society of Automotive Engineers, a nonprofit group that plays a large role in setting industry technical standards, organized the conference, the industry's first gathering to review the overall safety issues presented by light trucks.

In a speech at the conference, which focused mostly on sport utility vehicles, the auto industry's leading safety official responded indignantly to suggestions that a broad safety problem existed.

Insurance data show that sport utility vehicles have a slightly lower death rate per registered vehicle than that of cars, said Barry Felrice, the director of regulatory affairs for the American Automobile Manufacturers Association.

But Kennerly Digges, director of safety research at the National Crash Analysis Center, an organization financed by the government and the auto industry, presented a study showing that once people in sport utility vehicles are involved in an accident, they are as likely to die as people in cars.

That is true because the high death rate when sport utility vehicles roll over offsets the low death rate in all other collisions, Digges said. Sport utility vehicles are four times as likely as cars to roll over in an accident, he found.

The insurance data cited by the auto manufacturers does not adjust for the fact that sport utility vehicles are often driven by middle-aged parents who have few accidents regardless of what they drive. By looking at what happens to people in vehicles that are involved in accidents, Digges was able to focus on whether sport utility vehicles do in fact provide more protection.

''People feel safer in them because they're higher and they're bigger, and as long as they're staying with all four wheels on the ground, they're fine,'' Digges said. ''But when they have four wheels in the air, there's a problem.''

Two automaker engineers said that they privately welcomed greater public scrutiny of light trucks because it would strengthen the hand of safety advocates inside the automakers who have questioned the shift toward ever bigger vehicles. Until recently, industry engineers who spoke up about light truck safety received little attention as marketing executives focused on the immense profits, said one engineer who insisted on anonymity.

''Voices were heard, they just weren't listened to,'' the engineer said.